Freitag, 23. Dezember 2016

After some discussions and initial thoughts within LXQt SIG I decided to put a first Fedora 25 LXQt remix together. Now I'd like to share the idea to get some input, especially on selection of applications 😊

LXQt in Fedora – the current state

We have packages and a package group in Fedora for quite a while now. It was submitted as a change in Fedora 22.
Up-to-date packages (version 0.11.x) are available for all supported Fedora releases and EPEL 7, but right now there is no live spin for this nice desktop. Fedora already provides a nice selection of spins for Cinnamon, LXDE, MATE, Plasma and Xfce. As LXQt is a growing project and some other distributions already provide (e.g. Manjaro) or develop (e.g. Lubuntu) LXQt versions of their distributions, Fedora should not wait any longer, especially as most packaging is done. The Fedora LXQt SIG also got some requests for a spin by users. As I made experiences on composing spins when I created Fedora Astronomy, I decided to change this.

Fedora LXQt – Spin or Remix?

A spin is an official compose of Fedora which went through the process of community discussions, trademark approval etc. and is integrated into Fedora's release engineering. A Fedora Remix on the other hand is a non-official project which is based on Fedora but not approved by the Fedora project itself. In case of the LXQt Remix, which is 100% based on Fedora, we provide it in that way first as we want to get some community input. It would not be possible to provide an official LXQt Spin for 25. For Fedora 26 we plan to submit the LXQt spin as a change, so if everything works fine we'll have an official Fedora LXQt Spin then 😊

The remix – current state

We are starting from scratch, the first step was to create a working live image. This has been done now, the remix contains a very basic LXQt desktop with a very limited set of packages (almost nothing except a browser (QupZilla), a terminal (qterminal) and the Qt port of the PCManFM file manager). For the official spin this has to be changed of course, we already have a list of Qt based applications to enhance it. This includes tools the typical set of applications like instant messaging, media player etc. Also the spin needs a proper theme, the default looks like it's from the 90ies 😛 So you'll get a very first impression, hopefully there will be huge development until Fedora 26 final release. But IMHO it is better to have some kind of working basis than discussing things in theory (probably forever).

This is also an important point where you can help us! Do you have preferred (Qt based) applications you'd like to see in an official spin? E.g. which media player do you prefer?